Death Immortal

Everyone here is born with a birth tattoo on their wrist foretelling how they will die, but mine just read “Immortality”. This puzzled everyone. In school, some children considered me superhuman, while others thought of me as a freak. Some were even scared, fearing I’d bring about the end of our species. I didn’t know what to believe. Death and Immortality could not be anymore withdrawn from each other, so where did I fit in this paradox?

The fear of loss held me back in forming external relationships, and the one person I had feelings for died in a car crash when we were still in our twenties. I eventually lived through the deaths of not just my parents, but also of my older and younger siblings, their children, and even their children. The only respite I had was my studies. It was the only thing I could bury myself in. I learned every language, all types of art, and every field of science.

Three and a half centuries into my life, however, a strange phenomenon began to occur: a significant number of people were beginning to be born without any birth tattoo. I was perplexed. Did it mean they were immortal, just like me? But why did I have a tattoo that said it in the first place? While this was a confusing sign, it was also around that point that many people started being born with tattoos saying they’d die of disease. Half a century later, we were in the midst of a pandemic.

Struggling to find a cure for the disease at the time, I experimented on my own genes to find a cure. This not only led me to what I was looking for, but much more—immortality was something everyone could achieve.

I was scared and relieved at the same time. Having lived for so long, I was the only one who knew how immortality corroded the very essence of living. Decades would pass before cycles repeated and centuries decayed as everyone ran in circles… It was all too exhausting. I wondered whether immortality would at least help others see things as I did in the long run. The only roadblock ahead was overpopulation.

I soon revealed my breakthroughs to the public. The pandemic came to a halt within six months, and afterwards, as I expected, many were excited about gaining immortality. The “Everpill”, as they called it, was ready within a year. The majority of the world took it without hesitation.

Hearing praise for this historic milestone, I began to wonder whether there was more I could do. So I began private experiments on my own in an effort to bring back the love I never pursued. However, conducting these experiments in secret, I did not have the same freedom as I did with other projects. As such, the likelihood of a small mistake resulting in a disaster was high. But it was worth the risk; I needed to explore what more I was capable of.

My experiments seemed to be a success at first, but it soon proved to be a horrific mistake. What returned from the dead was not the person I wanted—it was a being void of a conscience that syphoned the life of everything in its wake. His icy hands wrapped around my throat, draining my immortal life with each passing second. The world around me blurred into a dark haze as I felt my consciousness slip into nothingness.